Pretty burnt out on climbing right now, at least with the stuff close to Colorado Springs. So I thought I would post just a few of the shots I took yesterday. My Sustainable Development class went to the Cripple Creek Gold Mine, located on the other side of Pikes Peak from Colorado Springs.. An open pit cyanide heat leach mining process is used there to extract gold from the ore. The mine operates 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. Over 75,000 tons of ore are blasted, dug, removed, ground, and leached per day. For every 300 tons of ore, 1 once of gold is retrieved. The mine has been in operation since 1993 and are currently permitted to continue removing material until 2012, with the final land reclamation estimated to be finished by 2020. Besides the obvious impact of removing that much material from the earth and leaching it with cyanide, the operation also uses 330 gallons of water a minute and each of the 14 30o ton load trucks consumes about a gallon of oil per mile driven. It is hard to comprehend the scale in these photos but trust me that this place is on a completely different level than anything I have seen before.
Filtering the bonded gold-cyanide through carbon bits to take it out of solution.
Bags of the Sri Lankan "coconut shell" carbon bits
The main dig site at the mine. The trees at the top are large evergreens and from the bottom to the top it is around 750 feet. This particular pit will be dug to 1300 feet.
The 300 ton capacity trucks. For scale the wheel of the truck is 15 feet tall and costs 15000 dollars. There are six on each of the 14 trucks used at Cripple Creek and each one is replaced every 8 months.
6 comments:
Great post Hayden. "Hard to comprehend the scale" indeed.
What is the gold used for?
I wonder what their definition of "land reclamation" is.
Hope the fire returns by Sunday, we have an appointment with Scalius.
I agree. Great post. Very interesting. I wouldn't be opposed to seeing more of your photos during stagnant climbing periods. You have a really good eye and most of the time your toning is superb! Hey it's better then no post at all.
thanks for the feedback ryan. i actually really enjoyed shooting the photos there and would be psyched to put up more non-climbing shots.
as to your questions chris, the gold is melted down and poured into ingots to be sold. supposedly a lot of it is being moved to india where people are buying gold as a substitute for currency for savings due to a lack of trust in the value of the rupee. the land reclamation involves the removal of all the cyanide and ammonium nitrates and then all slopes have to be a 2:1 ratio (ie 2 feet horizontally to every vertical foot) and then revegitated (to what degree i dont know) to prevent erosion.
also, don't worry about sunday. i am super psyched. if you want to save a bit on gas (assuming you can stay as long as us, which will probably be around 4) you could meet ander byron and i in the springs and we could all head up together.
when does the hybrid version of that truck come out so i can drive more crashpads and humans for 1,000,000 miles between fill ups?
awesome
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